Hard Lives ... Easy Targets

Advocates Hope A Census Gives A Clearer Picture Of Street People And The Daily Dangers They Face

January 22, 2006|By Stephen Deere and Chrystian Tejedor Staff Writers

Gordon Brown stands against a backdrop of multimillion-dollar condominium towers. With a quick toss, he flings a fishing line into the dark and choppy Intracoastal.

The homeless man sits on the seawall off Flagler Drive, hoping for a bite. If the 42-year-old catches the right fish, such as a large snook, it could bring him as much as $50, he says. Food for a couple days. He wears a hooded coat, shorts and black shoes. He's a poet, he explains, and begins to recite his verse into the wind.

"Who am I?" he says. "This I must ask. To search and find is a difficult task."

Indeed it is. So much so, that dozens of advocates and workers from city and county agencies will spend one day this week scouring Palm Beach County trying to get the homeless to fill out a census.

It is an annual process made more difficult by fear, a fear that grew more tangible last week when two teenagers in Fort Lauderdale were caught on a security camera beating a homeless man with a bat.

Advocates in Palm Beach County say what happened in Fort Lauderdale Jan. 12 is not uncommon. But no one was aware of any recent attacks by thrill-seeking youths here.

Many local homeless people said they knew of the incident, and some were growing apprehensive.

Davie Cochem, 47, says he feels safe in the wooded area of Boca Raton where he lives, although he's had one dangerous run-in with teenagers.

"I thought it was the wind breaking some branches around me," Cochem says. "I got up and looked at them standing by the railroad tracks, and then I saw something whizzing past. I realized that they were shooting at me. ... They're just kids. They do stupid things because they need to feel better by knocking somebody down."

Advocates hope the census will give them a clearer picture of an amorphous community. What they have now are fragmented snapshots that are as varied as the people who make up this complex and illusory society.

"If you want to work on the problem, you have to know where you stand," says Suzanne Cabrera, executive director of The Lord's Place, a West Palm Beach homeless-relief organization.

As of the last count, the county's homeless population was just under 4,000. But many advocates suspect it's far more than that, and they surmise that about 35 percent are children.

Statewide it is estimated that about 83,400 people were homeless on any given day in 2005, according to an annual report from the Department of Children & Families.

The causes of homeless include job loss, family breakups, domestic violence, physical and mental disabilities and health problems, according to the report.

Advocates call it an invisible problem. The homeless often hide, they say, and in Palm Beach County contradict stereotypes of grizzled panhandlers pushing shopping carts.

"That's really the wrong image," Cabrera says. "We are finding more and more people coming into our facility that have jobs and just cannot make ends meet. ... It's frightening."

Fifty percent of the homeless in Palm Beach County have been so less than one year, says Gerard Desmarais, executive director of the Homeless Coalition of Palm Beach County.

Frequently he encounters families of four with incomes of about $30,000 a year.

"In Palm Beach County, you can't survive on that," he says.

Attacks increase

Brown points to a knife on the sidewalk. The blade is about 8 inches, glimmering beneath the streetlight.

That's what he uses to fillet fish, he says.

And to protect himself.

He says he heard about the beatings that occurred about 45 miles south of here. He has been on the streets about six months, he says, and has avoided being attacked mainly because he knows how to handle himself.

"Some people talk crazy to me," he says. "I talk crazy back to them."

The trend of violence began nationally in 1999, says Michael Stoops, acting director of the National Homeless Coalition, when the bodies of seven homeless men turned up dead in Denver. Two were decapitated.

Since then, violence against the homeless has risen, Stoops says.

Stoops, author of six reports on hate crimes against the homeless, says that attacks on the homeless seemed to decrease in 2002 but began rising again the next two years.

"Our preliminary analysis for the 2005 data is that there is a continuing increase," Stoops says.

In the end, there are no easy answers for the increase in violence, he says.

Bishop Avis Hill, pastor of Westgate Tabernacle just outside West Palm Beach's city limits, has opened his church to throngs of homeless for years. Not only must the homeless guard against teenagers seeking a cheap thrill, but they also must be wary of one another, Hill says. "I've seen two homeless people fight over a shirt," he says, adding that the homeless desperately protect what little they do have.

`I'm always scared'

After years of living on the streets, Billy Schmid knows which South Florida cities to avoid: Lake Worth, Riviera Beach, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale.